Paris Made Easy: Sights, Restaurants, Hotels and More (Europe Made Easy)

I prefer guidebooks that aren't just mammoth listings of everything (hotels, restaurants, sights). This compact book hits the target with its highlights and its walking tours. You get directions, maps and commentary. Boxed notes give relevance to much that you would unknowingly pass by. Boxed in sage green are SHOPPING TIPS and ENTERTAINMENT TIPS while RESTAURANT TIPS are boxed in dark green. This covers the sights on the Island and the 20 Arrondissements plus some further afield (Versailles, Disneyland Paris, etc.). The second part of the book details walks to take. Try the Islands walk, the Left Bank walk, the Marais walk, the major sights walk, the Montmartre walk, or some culinary walks. Sage green boxes highlight DETOURS to catch a special sight. I wish I'd had this on my first visit to Paris which I found quite expensive and a little overwhelming.

This pocket size guide really does make a trip tp Paris easy. The details by Arrondissement(district/neighborhoods)are very useful. The restaurant/Bistro tips were uniformly solid. The walks were easy to navigate and enriched strolling through Paris.The most useful guide to Paris I have seen. A minor gripe: a sugested list of French phrases for the non-French speaker could use a phonetic guide.

I picked up Paris Made Easy just before a return trip to the City of Light, and I wish I'd had it the first time around! The title says it all: the content of this book, the way it's organized, and even its size made it the one guide I used day in and day out. Do yourself a favor and leave the heavy guidebooks with the glossy pictures at home. (You're going to be seeing all those sights in person, anyway, right?) Paris Made Easy has great info on restaurants, museums, shopping, walks -- and not only the famous sights, but also some obscure yet really fun destinations that you might never discover otherwise. Good maps, too. Because it's all organized by neighborhood (arrondissement) in a compact format, I could just drop the guide in my purse, start wandering, and pull it out to find a place to eat or an interesting sight to see wherever I happened to end up. That freedom to explore made me feel much more like an insider and much less like a tourist. The author's writing style is another plus: conversational, down-to-earth, and funny, but also very clear. (For example, I decided on the spur of the moment to venture outside Paris to visit Versailles, and a quick look at Paris Made Easy gave me such good instructions that I didn't even need to ask questions at the train station. In fact, I must have looked pretty confident, because people were asking me for directions!) Check out the price of this book, too. With all the information you get, it's a real bargain. I can't recommend it enough!